Good News on the Vince Fumo Front

It’s rare these days to get anything resembling encouraging political news. Harrisburg and Washington are disaster areas of dysfunctional partisanship. About the only thing any of our leaders can agree on is that they deserve to be insulated from whatever terrible things are happening to the rest of us.

I wrote a blog post a couple of years ago that reflected this cynical view. Here it is. I only regurgitate it here because I have an encouraging update to offer at the end.

One of the unfortunate things about our sorry state institutions is that they give us such low expectations.

If you just assume that the governor, the Legislature, the courts and various and sundry state agencies will cheat us, ignore the state Constitution and help themselves to our money at every turn, you’re less likely to be shocked or disappointed.

So it was with former state Sen. Vince Fumo, a very clever, powerful man who most everyone suspected was a terrible crook. Even after he was charged, faced with overwhelming evidence of his crookedness, I couldn’t help assuming that he would get off somehow, or that if he didn’t, some judge would go easy on him.

Well, he was convicted on 137 federal corruption counts, and federal prosecutors wanted him to get more than 15 years of jail time. When someone betrays the public trust with that kind of audacity and greed and we finally get the goods on him, we should throw the book at him. Right?

Not in Pennsylvania, and certainly not for someone with the Vince of Darkness' connections. U.S. District Judge Ronald Buckwalter Tuesday disregarded the sentencing guideline range of about 10 to 12 years for Fumo’s offenses, instead sentencing him to just 55 months. Why? Because of his record of public service.

Think about that for a moment. His record of public service includes CHEATING US OUT OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!??!

Sorry.

Buckwalter noted that he hasn’t really heard or read much public outcry, actually remarking that no member of state Senate showed up to complain about Fumo's actions. That’s like going easy on Al Capone because John Dillinger didn’t criticize him. And anyway, who cares how many people wrote the judge or showed up in the court? A crook is a crook is a crook.

All this would be tremendously discouraging, except that it’s pretty much what I expected. So instead, I’ll just say: It figures.

So what’s the good news? The federal prosecutors appealed this disgraceful sentence, arguing that Buckwalter had been far too lenient and that Fumo should get up to 27 years in prison -- and an appeals court Tuesday upheld Fumo’s conviction and ordered his resentencing, concluding that Buckwalter “abused” his discretion and erred in his calculations of the financial loss resulting from Fumo’s fraud. They said the loss was closer to $4 million than the $2.5 million figure set by the trial judge.

Unless Buckhalter has received an ethics transplant since his original decision, it’s difficult to imagine that he’ll decide now to throw the book at the wonderful public servant he praised the first time. But at least prosecutors will get another opportunity to argue that he deserves a lot more than the relative slap on the wrist he got, and we’ll all get another shot at abusing Buckhalter if he screws it up again.